Alan Caruba's blog is a daily look at events, personalities, and issues from an independent point of view. Copyright, Alan Caruba, 2015. With attribution, posts may be shared. A permission request is welcome. Email acaruba@aol.com.

Thursday, October 10, 2013

Mr. President, Tear Down This Barricade!

By Alan
Caruba

Ronald
Reagan made a lot of history as President, but when he stood before the
Brandenburg Gate not far from the Berlin Wall that divided the city and said,
“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”, he rocked the foundations of the Soviet
empire on June 12, 1987.By 1989, the
wall was opened and, in 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed.

Now
thousands of Americans are saying “Mr. Obama, tear down these barricades,” They
have become a symbol of the dictatorial style that has emerged over the first
term of the President and now demonstrate it for everyone to see in the first
year of his second term.

What is
also on display are the cracks in the foundation of Obama’s presidency and
administration. The first occurred in the 2010 midterm elections that returned
power to the Republican Party in the House of Representatives. In the Senate
these days, even the Democrats are beginning to break ranks with the White
House, resisting on many fronts, “crossing the aisle” rather than vote the
party line and risk reelection.

Obama has
left them little choice with his oft-repeated threat that he will not negotiate
with Republicans, choosing instead to use his office to garner airtime and
press coverage to disparage them as terrorists, anarchists, hostage-takers, and
kidnappers, to name just of few examples of his petulant, idiotic name-calling.

The job of
a President is to negotiate. Every one of his predecessors in the office
negotiated fulltime, seven days a week, either with his own party with the
opposing one.

Obama and
those who created the image of Obama have gone blind and deaf. They’ve been
inside the White House bubble so long that forgot how ordinary people react when
the President orders that national monuments and parks are shut down and
barricades get between veterans and visitors.

When the
administration opened up the National Mall to a rally by illegal aliens, the
contempt for all the rest of us—natural born and naturalized citizens—could not
have been more clear. The selective malevolence of the access that was denied
makes a lasting impression, even on the “low information” voters.

The
President’s approval rating dropped to 37% on October 9th. Congress
scores in the single digits. There is a lot of unhappiness among the voters and
all the campaign-style speeches and photo-ops are not going to turn this
around.

Watching
the media trim and adjust its sails is interesting as well. When Kathleen
Sebelius, the Secretary of Health and Human Services ran into a buzz saw on Jon
Stewart’s “Daily Show”, it sent a signal to other liberal media personalities
that it was okay to finally question what the administration was doing,
particularly as regards Obamacare. The liberal lemmings may not want to jump
off the cliff with the White House.

There’s
one thing that has gone largely unnoticed during the “shutdown.” It takes weeks
and months for the federal government to order anything. It is a huge
bureaucracy. So why were all those printed signs available for the “shutdown”?
Does the government keeps such things in a big warehouse somewhere?

The answer
could be that Obama and his political advisors have been planning the shutdown
and, in particular, the plan for the President to beat up the Republicans. He
has begun now to gear up the Democrat Party campaign for the November 2014
midterm elections. We are witnessing a
deliberate effort to berate non-stop the Republican Party in general and the
Tea Party movement in particular. The press conference in which the President
held forth for over an hour is an example, but significantly, his approval
rates dropped to a new low of 37%.

Harry
Truman did this in 1948 when he ran for election after filling out the term of
Franklin Roosevelt who had died soon after his fourth reelection. Truman
disparaged a “do nothing” Congress, controlled by the Republican Party, even
though its actual record showed that it had passed a number of laws he favored.
It was pure demagoguery and, combined with a tireless campaign of whistle-stop
speeches, secured Truman election when everyone assumed Thomas Dewey would be
the winner.

It could
be that Obama has taken a lesson from that election, but he is not running to
be reelected. He is running to gain full control over Congress of the kind that
allowed him to ram through the Affordable Care Act—Obamacare—in 2009. There
were huge protests then and there will be more now.

A rally of
truckers will seek to close down the capital this weekend in protest of
Obamacare and other administration policies. Another rally will follow soon
after by veterans. Indeed, I suspect 2014 is going to be remembered for a score
of rallies that reflect the anger that has finally boiled up into action. As
more and more Americans discover that their healthcare insurance premiums have
doubled and tripled, they are going to blame one man—Barack Hussein Obama.

Obama has
completely misread the character of the American people, perhaps because he
lacks any character of his own.

About Me

I am and have been for a long time a writer by profession. I have several books to my credit and my daily column, "Warning Signs", is disseminated on many Internet news and opinion websites, as well as blogs. In addition, I am a longtime book reviewer and have a blog offering a monthly report on new fiction and non-fiction.